


Clueless

by notjustmom



Series: Ironstrange [36]
Category: Doctor Strange (2016), Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Tom Robbins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-17
Updated: 2019-04-17
Packaged: 2020-01-15 14:09:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18500590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notjustmom/pseuds/notjustmom
Summary: “Dreamily the Princess stood up. "I'm not sure if I can walk," she said."Then I'll carry you.""Is that what love is?""I no longer know what love is. A week ago I had a lot of ideas. What love is and how to make it stay. Now that I'm in love, I haven't a clue. Now that I'm in love, I'm completely stupid on the subject.”― Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker





	Clueless

Perhaps in some other universe or dimension, they would have found it funny.

Or not.

Tony had a tendency to laugh at the worst possible time, especially when a snort of laughter was not the most acceptable response; and if you asked Stephen he probably couldn't tell you the last time he laughed, at anything, funny or otherwise.

It wasn't love at first sight, far from it. 

In the first place, Tony and Pepper had finally set a date, five minutes before Stephen showed up in the park, and Tony was having the baby Morgan dream again, and Stephen, though he knew every love song that ever made its way onto the Billboard Top 40 intimately, wouldn't know the first thing about how to make love stay.

 

Naturally, the universe where they actually existed had its own issues to deal with and wasn't overly concerned with the feelings or non-feelings of two human beings who had just met, either by accident or by fate, and time passed as it tends to do.

Time continued to pass, and through brute force, sorcery and a truck load of sheer stubbornness, the universe managed to remain intact as it always did, in spite of the tendency of its inhabitants' annoying habit of trying to destroy themselves and it, mostly as an afterthought.

 

Back to the love story. Yes, this began as a love story, or was trying to be a love story. 

Once they were done saving the universe in their timeline at any rate, and they emerged a little older, a bit more broken, and possibly wiser, they met for coffee every other Thursday. They weren't dates, exactly. Just talking over coffee, then talking over coffee and a shared piece of pie on the days the diner had strawberry-rhubarb on offer eventually turned into cuddle sessions on a couch, either at the Sanctum, or whichever penthouse suite Tony was currently holed up in. 

Neither of them, for all their genius level intellect, recognized the exact moment when it happened. 

Who ever does, really?  
It might have happened long before Stephen ordered the first piece of pie not because he was hungry, but because he could tell that Tony was still too thin from his weeks in space, or it might have been minutes after Tony first dropped by the Sanctum with a pizza, weeks after the first piece of pie, and woke the next morning on the couch, wrapped in the sorcerer's cloak. Said sorcerer was doing his levitation trick at Tony's feet, the sorcerer would insist it wasn't a trick - but that's an argument for another time. 

At any rate. At some point in time between the first coffee non-date and that rainy Wednesday morning, they both seemed to understand that no matter how they did the math, they had managed to fall in love.

 

"What now?" Stephen asked quietly as he studied Tony's face across the table in the ancient well-scrubbed kitchen.

"What do you mean, what now?" 

"I mean, how does 'this', I don't know, 'us', stay?"

Tony shrugged, and ran his fingers through his hair, then shrugged and smiled carefully. "You are asking the wrong person, Doc. I've been in love only once before, and you know how that turned out. You could stop time, as it stands at this moment, and how we feel at this moment won't change, but already that moment has passed. I think the only thing we can do to make love stay is to hold on tight to each other, and once in a while, when I'm driving you crazy about something, or vice versa, we will have to stop and remember what it was like when we thought the universe as we knew it snapped in half. I don't have an algorithm, or a piece of tech that will make love stay, and I think if you had a spell in all those ancient tomes of yours, you would have cast it already."

Stephen raised an eyebrow and whispered, "how do you know I haven't?"

Tony pushed back his chair, then stood up and walked over to where Stephen was sitting at the other end of the table. He could feel the same nervous energy he had sensed on Titan, and he shook his head, then gently placed a single finger under Stephen's chin and looked into the eyes that never ceased to astonish him. One minute they were silver, the next they could easily morph into a sea-green, and every once in a while, they became the same colors that recalled the instant when he opened his eyes and saw Earth for the first time in months. "Because you know how I feel about all that sorcery mumbo-jumbo, and, Doc, your eyes are all the magic I need, all I will ever need."


End file.
